Enterprises are regularly evaluating their business and customer data for purposes of analyzing that data and discerning patterns or opportunities. In fact, a variety of databases, database query languages, data mining, and data reporting tools and services exist within the industry for purposes of automating an enterprise's data collection, data mining, data analysis, and data reporting.
One aspect of data analysis is related to business measurements. A business measurement is where a piece of information is aggregated in some manner. For example, an attribute might be discrete groupings within age data that conforms to a range of predefined ages for customers, such as customer group 1: ages 17 and under, customer group 2: ages 18-24, customer group 3: ages 25-34, and so on. A measure may then be used to count the number of people in the 18-24 age grouping or even average the cost of insurance for people over age 60, etc.
Generally, these measures are manually established by a business analyst by creating custom queries and performing operations on the queries to generate intermediate tables of information. The intermediate information then forms a measurement that can be evaluated by the business analyst.
One obvious drawback to this approach is that it is not reproducible and it leads to a lot of rework. That is, unless one business analyst is familiar with the work of another, a particular measure is not reusable and is recreated. Moreover, even if an existing measure is communicated, it is often not directly on point and requires manual modification to be useful.
Additionally, measures are often not categorized in any automated sense such that measures, which are related to one another, are easily located. Thus, even if there is a manual attempt to share measures; that manual process is likely fraught with comprehension problems because measures are not typically classified in related areas such that locating a desired measure is something practically and efficiently achievable.
Thus, it can be seen that improved business measurement construction, management, and processing are desirable.